On February 22, 2005, California State Senator Joe Dunn introduced the “Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program” (SB 670) in the California State Legislature. The bill’s purpose was to “express the apology of the State of California to those individuals who were illegally deported and coerced into emigrating to Mexico and would require that a plaque to commemorate those individuals be installed and maintained by the Department of Parks and Recreation in an appropriate public place in Los Angeles.” The Repatriation Act forcibly deported Mexican-Americans during the 1930s, including US citizens who were born in the US and had never traveled to Mexico. The Program was enacted between 1929 and 1939, when as many as 500,000 people of Mexican descent were forced or intimidated into leaving the US.